When U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, spoke with constituents Tuesday evening for his first town hall meeting, one of the most recurring topics was gun control.

Many in Tuesday’s predominantly working-class, middle -aged-and- above crowd of about 150 at the Putnam County Agricultural Center in East Palatka said they wanted assurance from DeSantis that he would stand up for their Second Amendment rights.

One man asked DeSantis what his thoughts were on the gun ban bill proposed by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., which seeks to put limits on assault weapons.

“To me, that is not the right way to go about it,” he said. “I support the Second Amendment, and I ran saying I believe it confers the rights to individuals to bear arms, and I think her bill runs afoul of that. When you start talking about banning guns that are in broad circulation, not only does that violate the Constitution, but if you read Keller vs. the District of Columbia, Justice (Antonin) Scalia talked about how if a gun is something that’s in society as a whole, then that by definition is going to have Second Amendment protection.”

A woman asked him how he felt about sheriffs and police chiefs around the country saying they will not follow “an unconstitutional order” to confiscate firearms, citing the recent gun laws that passed in New York. “What are you going to do to protect those people?” she asked.

DeSantis said he sympathized with them but that it was a matter of states’ rights and he didn’t believe a federal official could or should intervene.

“What I can do, however, is not embrace those policies at the federal level,” he said. “But I don’t know that I would try to get involved with what’s going on in New York. I think the folks in New York probably need to fight that battle. All I can do is try to prevent that (type of legislation) from coming out of Congress.”

DeSantis also said he would support a national state-to-state reciprocity rule that would allow permit holders to transport weapons across state lines to their home state, where their weapons are legal.

“Basically, if you’re acting within your rights, and you’re going from, say, Florida to Virginia, then you should have protection as long as you’re within the laws of your state,” he said. “And here’s the thing with a lot of firearms restrictions: very rarely do they affect criminals. They really only affect law-abiding citizens. That’s not really what we need to be doing.”

Other questions dealt with the future of the Republican party and immigration reform.

Broadening GOP appeal

A man from East Palatka noted the average age of the audience and asked, “Where are the young people?” He asked DeSantis how the party can broaden its base to include more of them.

DeSantis agreed it was something Republicans should address and said part of the problem was a liberal bias among the academic community on college campuses.

“Younger people tend to not want to get involved as much,” he said. “So, what can we do as Republicans? I think there are a number of things. One is that you can’t write off certain segments of the population. We look at it and say, ‘Oh, these college kids, with liberal colleges, they’re not going to listen to anything we say.’ Well, if you don’t show up and make the case, then they definitely aren’t going to listen. I want to go to college campuses and engage in debate, to be able to articulate ideas that they will not hear in their classrooms, because there are very few professors throughout the entire country who are not only to the left, but pretty far to the left of the American people.”

He also said the party “needs to start getting into certain communities.”

“For example, we don’t usually do much in urban areas,” he said. “We tend to leave that to the Democratic party, who have these machines. If you get in there and start making the case, you’re not going to all of a sudden flip an 80-20 difference.

“But if you get 5 percent this year, 10 percent the next year, and you build on that, that’s how you build a long-term movement that can sustain itself. I think what we’ve done as Republicans for the last 20 years is say, ‘OK, we need these six swing states to go our way to get the 270 electoral votes, so we’re going to focus all of our time, resources and energy on trying to convince the NASCAR dad or the soccer mom in those particular swing districts. To me, that’s short-sighted. If you look at what the president did, the Democrats took a lot of resources and they invested those in getting involved in these communities, talking to people and getting them on their side, people who not necessarily would be out voting normally. That’s a lesson. They were doing a lot of hard work over a four-year period. So, for us, you can’t just sweep in three months before an election, run fancy commercials and think that somehow you’re going to broaden the movement and get people to embrace conservative principles.”

Immigration reform

He was asked how he felt about a bipartisan immigration reform effort put forth in the U.S. Senate by four Republicans — including U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, that calls for sweeping changes to the immigration system, including a path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.

“I have not been able to read up on all the details, because I know the president spoke today,” DeSantis said. “But the small amount of information I received is that he criticized what Sen. Rubio and some of his colleagues did, because he said they had all these enforcement provisions, and the president doesn’t want that. He basically wants to move in to legalization and citizenship immediately. That’s not something that I would support. It’s also not something that I think we can afford. Because once you’re a legal American citizen, you’re going to have access to the new health care subsidies, you’re going to have access to the welfare state. So, I think that’s a problem, if the president’s going to go down that road.”

He said the issue shouldn’t be dealt with on a partisan basis and that what’s right for the country should be the bottom line.

“The question is, does (President Barack Obama) actually want to try to fix the immigration system? Or does he want a political issue, to try to say that Republicans are hostile to immigrants?

“Most Republicans I know embrace legal immigration. There are a lot of people who are 10th-generation trust-fund kids from Manhattan, and they hate America. They’re spoiled, and they don’t appreciate what America has to offer. Then you have somebody from Vietnam or Ecuador or places like that who really work hard and are willing to wait out this very cumbersome system to become a citizen because they believe in what the country stands for, they believe that it offers something different than what their homeland offers. That’s something I’ve always embraced and will continue to embrace, and I definitely want to make sure that if there are changes that are going to be benefiting people who came here illegally at the expense of legal would-be immigrants who are going through the system the right way, that would be something I would have a problem with. The people who do it the right way should definitely not be the ones who are disadvantaged when we’re talking about reform.”

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